Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — AWS S3 + CloudFront vs Sharp vs Uppy

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## AWS S3 + CloudFront (aws-s3-cloudfront)
- URL: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: mixed — S3 Standard $0.023/GB-month (us-east-1), PUT $0.005/1K, GET $0.0004/1K. CloudFront: first 1 TB/mo and 10M requests free, then $0.085/GB NA/EU declining to $0.020/GB. S3 direct-to-internet egress $0.09/GB
- What it is: The default building blocks: S3 for durable object storage, CloudFront for global caching and delivery. Neither transforms images — that means Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions or a separate service. CloudFront now also sells flat-rate plans, free at 100 GB and Pro at $15/mo.
- Why builders pick it: Unmatched ecosystem, durability and regional control, and serving through CloudFront avoids the $0.09/GB S3 egress rate. The 1 TB per month always-free CloudFront tier covers a surprising share of a small publication's traffic.
- Trap: S3 egress straight to the internet is $0.09/GB — always front it with CloudFront. There is no built-in image optimization, so AVIF/WebP negotiation is entirely yours to build and maintain.
- Wiring: npm i @aws-sdk/client-s3
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/aws-s3-cloudfront

## Sharp (sharp)
- URL: https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: free — Free and open source under Apache-2.0. Infrastructure cost only — you run it on your own compute
- What it is: High-performance Node.js image processing built on libvips. Reads and writes JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and SVG, and resizes roughly 4-5x faster than ImageMagick by streaming small regions of uncompressed data instead of loading whole images into memory.
- Why builders pick it: The engine underneath most hosted services and Next.js image optimization. Use it to pre-generate AVIF and WebP derivatives at build time and serve them as static files — zero per-transformation cost, forever.
- Trap: You own the caching, invalidation, URL scheme and CDN — Sharp is a library, not a service. Native libvips binaries can complicate deployment on some serverless targets and on Alpine or musl-based containers.
- Wiring: npm i sharp
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/sharp

## Uppy (uppy)
- URL: https://uppy.io
- Category: Images, video & files
- Cost: free — Free and MIT licensed, no paid edition — all plugins ship in the base package. Self-host the optional Companion server, or use the one Transloadit hosts
- What it is: Modular JavaScript upload UI: drag and drop, progress, retries, resumable tus uploads, crash recovery, image cropping before upload and 40 locales. The optional Companion server pulls files straight from Google Drive, Dropbox, Instagram or a URL without routing through the user's device.
- Why builders pick it: The best upload front end you can get without building one. Resumable uploads and remote-source imports work against any backend — S3, tus, XHR or Transloadit — and nothing about it locks you to a vendor.
- Trap: Uppy only handles the client side; storage, transformation and delivery are still yours to build. Remote sources require running and securing the Companion server plus your own OAuth credentials.
- Wiring: npm i @uppy/core @uppy/dashboard @uppy/tus
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/uppy

## Quick read

- Free with no card: Sharp, Uppy.

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=aws-s3-cloudfront,sharp,uppy